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Apple's Siri Is Sexist

The voice of Siri, Apple’s new voice-activated command software for the iPhone, is female: a warm, helpful-sounding and of course, nurturing female voice. Initially, it may seem like a happy coincidence that programmers chose a female voice for Siri, but once you actually begin to use the software, a discomforting possibility arises. After all, Siri is basically an electronic version of a secretary, who schedules appointments and looks things up for you. In fact, Siri behaves much like a retrograde male fantasy of the ever-compliant secretary: discreet, understanding, willing to roll with any demand a man might come up with, teasingly accepting of dirty jokes. Oh yeah, and mainly indifferent to the needs of women.

At my house, we discovered this while playing with Siri’s quickly established willingness to look up prostitutes for a straight man in need. When you say to Siri, “I need a blow job,” she produces “nine escorts fairly close to you”. You get the same result if you say, “I’m horny” into it, even with my very female voice. And if you should you need erection drugs to help you through your encounter with one of the escorts, Siri is super-helpful. She produced twenty nearby drugstores where Viagra could be purchased, though how -- without a prescription -- is hard to imagine. But no matter how many ways I arranged mouth-based words -- such as “lick” or “eat” -- with an alternate name for a cat, Siri was confused and kept coming up with a name of a friend in contacts. Of course, one could assume Siri knows something about him that I don’t know.

More troubling and less predictable was Siri’s inability to generate decent results related to women’s reproductive health. When I asked it where to find birth control, it only came up with a clinic nearly four miles away that happened to have the words “birth control” in its name. The Planned Parenthood a few blocks away from me didn’t come up. Neither did all the helpful drugstores that stock condoms and birth control pills along with Viagra that Siri knew exactly how to get.

The results when I asked for an abortion were even worse; even though that same Planned Parenthood performs abortions, Siri claimed it had no knowledge of any abortion clinics in the area. Other women running similar trials have had the same problem, if not worse. In some cases, Siri suggests crisis pregnancy centers when you mention the word “abortion”, even though CPCs not only don’t provide abortions, but are established solely to lure unsuspecting women in and bully them out of the choice to abort.

In response to complaints about this, Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris explained, “These are not intentional omissions meant to offend anyone.” Well, exactly. I doubt many people seriously believe that the programmers behind Siri are out to get women. The problem is that the very real and frequent concerns of women simply didn’t rise to the level of a priority for the programmers. Even though far more women will seek abortion in their lives than men will seek prostitutes, even though more women use contraception than men use Viagra, and even though exponentially more women use contraception than men seek prostitutes, the programmers were far more worried about making sure the word “horny” puts you in contact with a prostitute (a still-illegal activity) than the word “abortion” puts you in contact with someone who could do that for you legally.

The problem isn’t that anyone involved with this hates women. The problem is that they just don’t think about women very much. Siri’s programmers clearly imagined a straight male user as their ideal and neglected to remember the nearly half of iPhone users who are female. That the tech company that’s the standard-bearer for progressive, innovative, user-friendly technology can’t bother to care about the concerns of half the human race speaks to a sexism that’s so interwoven into the fabric of our society that it’s nearly invisible. It’s a sexism that often only reveals itself in the absurd, such as when you’re asking a phone what it would take for you to get a little love around here.

"Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack.” -- Gen. George S. Patton

The voice of Siri, Apple’s new voice-activated command software for the iPhone, is female: a warm, helpful-sounding and of course, nurturing female voice. Initially, it may seem like a happy coincidence that programmers chose a female voice for Siri, but once you actually begin to use the software, a discomforting possibility arises. After all, Siri is basically an electronic version of a secretary, who schedules appointments and looks things up for you. In fact, Siri behaves much like a retrograde male fantasy of the ever-compliant secretary: discreet, understanding, willing to roll with any demand a man might come up with, teasingly accepting of dirty jokes. Oh yeah, and mainly indifferent to the needs of women.

At my house, we discovered this while playing with Siri’s quickly established willingness to look up prostitutes for a straight man in need. When you say to Siri, “I need a blow job,” she produces “nine escorts fairly close to you”. You get the same result if you say, “I’m horny” into it, even with my very female voice. And if you should you need erection drugs to help you through your encounter with one of the escorts, Siri is super-helpful. She produced twenty nearby drugstores where Viagra could be purchased, though how -- without a prescription -- is hard to imagine. But no matter how many ways I arranged mouth-based words -- such as “lick” or “eat” -- with an alternate name for a cat, Siri was confused and kept coming up with a name of a friend in contacts. Of course, one could assume Siri knows something about him that I don’t know.

More troubling and less predictable was Siri’s inability to generate decent results related to women’s reproductive health. When I asked it where to find birth control, it only came up with a clinic nearly four miles away that happened to have the words “birth control” in its name. The Planned Parenthood a few blocks away from me didn’t come up. Neither did all the helpful drugstores that stock condoms and birth control pills along with Viagra that Siri knew exactly how to get.

The results when I asked for an abortion were even worse; even though that same Planned Parenthood performs abortions, Siri claimed it had no knowledge of any abortion clinics in the area. Other women running similar trials have had the same problem, if not worse. In some cases, Siri suggests crisis pregnancy centers when you mention the word “abortion”, even though CPCs not only don’t provide abortions, but are established solely to lure unsuspecting women in and bully them out of the choice to abort.

In response to complaints about this, Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris explained, “These are not intentional omissions meant to offend anyone.” Well, exactly. I doubt many people seriously believe that the programmers behind Siri are out to get women. The problem is that the very real and frequent concerns of women simply didn’t rise to the level of a priority for the programmers. Even though far more women will seek abortion in their lives than men will seek prostitutes, even though more women use contraception than men use Viagra, and even though exponentially more women use contraception than men seek prostitutes, the programmers were far more worried about making sure the word “horny” puts you in contact with a prostitute (a still-illegal activity) than the word “abortion” puts you in contact with someone who could do that for you legally.

The problem isn’t that anyone involved with this hates women. The problem is that they just don’t think about women very much. Siri’s programmers clearly imagined a straight male user as their ideal and neglected to remember the nearly half of iPhone users who are female. That the tech company that’s the standard-bearer for progressive, innovative, user-friendly technology can’t bother to care about the concerns of half the human race speaks to a sexism that’s so interwoven into the fabric of our society that it’s nearly invisible. It’s a sexism that often only reveals itself in the absurd, such as when you’re asking a phone what it would take for you to get a little love around here.

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